Poet's Choice

what you once knew,

and that's why everything you do has some weird

failure in it.

When I read this poem as a young woman who didn't believe she had a soul, I felt it pierce me with its psychological acuity. Kabir lists "birds and animals and the ants" in a way that draws the eye from the soaring sky to the earth's crawly, exoskeletal creatures. In doing so, he connects a vague, blank heaven and the tiny, miraculous particular. He inspires us to re-observe the world. In the pagan, pantheistic world view, when we disconnect from nature, we unplug from the divine source. In the Judeo-Christian view, when we orphan ourselves from God, we go dark. In the psychological model, when we try to wall off our true selves or pasts, we forget who we are. Kabir always turns us to the god inside us, as in this poem:

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine

rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:

not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around

your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me

instantly --

you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?

He is the breath inside the breath.

Bly doesn't apologize for not knowing the Hindi of the originals or the Bengali translation that inspired the Victorian English he cribbed from. "If anyone speaking Hindi would like to help me," he writes, "I'll do them over." These translations could be more accurate, maybe, but hardly more powerful.

(These poems are from "The Kabir Book" by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1971, 1977 by Robert Bly. © 1977 by the Seventies Press. Reprinted by permission of Beacon).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."